The first batch of Varèse Sarabande CD Club titles for our 40th Anniversary year begins with John Williams biggest pre-Star Wars score! We are so excited to present this revelatory Deluxe Edition of John Williams’ The Cowboys. The 1972 score is classic Williams, loaded with melody and adventure. This score followed Williams’ Academy Award-winning work on Fiddler On The Roof. In it he gave us his greatest and grandest western and one that would even spawn one of the composers greatest concert overtures, the beloved The Cowboys Overture.

For this new Deluxe Edition of the score we undertook the massive and much needed restoration job of a complete rebuild, remix and remaster. Hear The Cowboys for the very first time. The remix by Michael Matessino is beyond belief. Fans of this score, of John Williams and of great film music will revel in this production that we have been so looking forward to for so long.

One of screen icon John Wayne's finest twilight films, The Cowboys was a box-office hit in 1972. John Wayne stars as a rancher who will lose his livestock unless he can transform a ragtag bunch of schoolboys into cowboys. When all his ranch hands go off in search of gold, the veteran rancher is forced to hire eleven teenage boys as trail hands, and in the process of driving 1200 cattle across 400 rough miles, the young cowboys become cowmen. Directed by Mark Rydell, the excellent cast also includes Bruce Dern, Roscoe Lee Browne, Colleen Dewhurst, and teenagers Robert Carradine and A Martinez.